linderman

I submitted an alternate plan which would work well, however you choose to continue the xxclone battle when the software is not working correctly for you.

and by the way; the drive image clone WILL be bootable if the imaged partiton was bootable.

however at this point sooooooo much "stuff" has been tried on your external drive. I would wipe the whole drive with Dariks boot n Nuke eraser then repartition and reformat BEFORE using the image guide

the image process is very easy. Simply install drive image on your now C drive, from within that program make an imagr file of your C drive; you will need to store that image file on a partition on your USB drive, the storage partition will need to be say one gigabyte larger than 1/2 of your now C drive

in other words:

you have a 80 gig OS drive

after using boot & nuke >>>> you will need to partition your USB drive into two chunks, one chunk will be 41gigs the other partition will be the remaining size

after you have done the partitioning; format both chunks with NTFS

then run the image program, store the image file on the smaller 41 gig chunk of the USB drive, then execute the image restore command from within drive image xml, choose the image file you saved @ the samll chunk; tell the program to restore the image file to the big chunk of the USB drive, the program will tell you the target partition is larger than the image file; do you want to use the whole partition size = YES

after this is complete; enter diskmanagement and verify the USB drive partition that just had the image restored to it is set as the active partition>>>>>> this is done by simply right clicking on the partition section of that drive shown in the bottom half of disk management, after right clicking a drop down menu will appear, in that menu will be "set active" >>>>> hit yes
then afterwards swap drives from the machine, remove the old drive, install the USB drive (it wont be USB at that point ????? correct ???

boot the machine

keep us posted


PS aftwards we can remove the 41 gig partition if you desire so, but I think you will find it rather handy ???